ok, this morning I listened to a little bit of radio - Radio 5 live on 909 Medium Wave. The topic was pets. Harmless stuff... or so I thought.

First of all it started off sensibly and they were talking about pet healthcare insurance etc and more or less mentioning the same issues that the Americans were having with normal healthcare insurance.

But then they moved onto pampering the pets and this was... freaky?

There was a professional pet pamperer ont he show - when people went on holiday, they left the pets with her, but only if they wanted it pampered. electric blankets, designer clothes and the full shebang. her sentiment "when people take their child out for the first time, they take proper care and worry about all the dangers and buy the child the best clothes, why should it be any different for the pet?" she required brand named and tagged designer wear for the pets she pampered.

One person had bought a four poster bed for her cat, another only fed it veal, and a third had fed her pet a few hundred quids worth of caviar.

Luckily towards the end, some guy phones up questioning their sanity and wondered how they could in good conscience feed their pet caviar worth hundreds when 20p could provide a starving child with a meal in the third world, but the people on the show did not seem to be too happy at that suggestion... "we need to take care of our pets too... where do we draw the line? its not that easy a question..."

I would think it was a non question that feeding your pet caviar or buying it a 4 poster bed or even designer clothes would be far over that line...

... but I am not a pet owner and probably wouldn't own one willingly.